I get a lot of gardening books to review, most of them interesting and informative but every now and then one comes along that sticks in my mind. Grounding isn’t a gardening book in the usual sense but an deeply personal exploration of why making a garden is important in the face of uncertainity and loss.
It follows several months in the life of author Lulah Ellender as she deals with the death of her mother and the possibility of eviction from the rented house and garden she has tended for ten years.
It was, she tells us, “a year that seemed impossible”.
At first, she saw little point in continuing to care for her Sussex plot but gradually she was drawn back in to weeding and sowing seeds: “It was a modest and quiet act of defiance.”
Her garden, we learn, is a valuable link to her mother – they used to swap seeds and garden together – and excerpts from her mother’s garden diary are woven throughout the book. Even so, the gradual changing of the seasons “increases the gap between us”.
(I was sent a book in return for a fair review.)
The need to create also stems from the loss of a childhood home and she suggests this is true of all displaced people from the Syrian refugees in camps in Kurdistan to migrants throughout history who take with them seeds from home.
Lessons are learned from visits to nearby gardens. Charleston, is another home that was merely ‘borrowed’ but even though she rented Vanessa Bell still continued to care for the house and garden.
“Living with uncertainity need not mean living dejectedly,” Lulah says, deciding to paint the front door rather than live in an increasingly scruffy house.
Like her, Vita Sackville-West’s need to create at Sissinghurst was driven by the loss of her family home: “She is another exile, and she uses her garden at Sissinghurst as a cure for this sorrow.”
The book is conversational in tone and its almost lyrical quality is one of its stengths. It offers a mix of observations of plants, animals and the changing seasons in her garden, with the rhythms of family life, and memories from childhood. It touches on racism, the relentlessness of grief and the innate human need to belong.
Most of the final draft was written during the height of the pandemic and it seems apt that the main lesson is one that was universal at that time – the simple act of tending for plants is a “reciprocal nuturing”.
“As I fill pots with seeds and watch tentative green shoots emerge from their frozen slumber, I feel the garden working on my mood, my sense of belonging and my outlook on life.”
Grounding, Finding Home in a Garden by Lulah Ellender is published by Granta with an RRP of £16.99. You can buy it here for £13.25 (If you buy via this link, I get a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.)
You can read more of my gardening and garden-related book reviews here.
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